by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: The Student Squad

The cover of the one complete issue of the Student Squad

The Student Squad is pretty much the first thing I ever worked on with any regularity.  At one point I did fifty days of daily updates to the web comic, building a relatively substantial arc of events and filling a nice healthy archive.

There are two reasons why I don’t really carry on with this any more:

1)  The characters were all loosely based on some very close friends of mine, so I never felt I could do anything too interesting with them and due to mild superstition was always scared of damaging or killing any of them just on the off chance that I might have created some form of Voodoo comic.

2)  I don’t think it’s very good.  At a later date I think I will compile a list of mistakes that webcomic authors can make drawing completely on my experience with the Student Squad, staring with the author self-insertion character and going from there.

Here is a pdf file of the first issue of the Student Squad.  Despite this being the first issue, it does still draw slightly on an archive of the older webcomics but was intended as an entry point for new readers.

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE (Recommend Right Click and “Save Target As” – File is about 30mb)

If that file is way too big, it is also available online in an old version of my website that I keep alive and can be found by following this link.

If I ever did resurrect this project and attempt to work on it further, I think I would go down the reboot-route and have some ideas on how I could make it more interesting and less…in my opinion…rubbish.  In short, I find it highly unlikely that I will carry on the Student Squad’s story as it exists above.

More than anything else, The Student Squad was a vehicle that taught me a hell of a lot about drawing both inside and outside of a computer and about web editing and maintaining a website.  If anyone ever wants to learn anything about any of these things, I can’t recommend trying to maintain a webcomic strongly enough.

Additional Notes:

It’s bizarre that almost every webcomic out there has some form of author self insertion and it rarely helps the comic.  There are a few notable exceptions but really it just seems like a bad idea.  This desire to put a caricature of yourself into your work I think goes beyond basic wish fulfilment and taps into something different.  It’s something I plan to write about and explore more in the future, and one of my more recent projects deals with self insertion characters in more detail.

by ·Comments Off on The Incomplete Works

I don’t believe in New Years Resolutions.  I think they’re daft and only set you up to look stupid when you inevitably fail.  Not only that, but if something is worth doing, you might as well just do it instead of needing to tie it to some date-triggered calendar event.  Despite all of this, I do have a sort-of-resolution-of-sorts.

I have a chronic problem whereby I constantly start projects and leave them hanging.  I know that I am not alone in this, but my problem extends to the point that I get distressed about their incomplete state, procrastinate, get more stressed about it, assign some arbitrary requirement for ultimate quality on the project, panic that my work will never be good enough for it and then never progress at all.  I have one project in particular that was born out of a five minute think on the bus about what I would do if I had to do a 24 hour comic, grew from there and now sits in my “I will never be artistically good enough to tell this story” pile with everything else.

My resolution that is happening at new year but is not a new years resolution is therefore the following:

This year, I will work on at least one of my unfinished projects and see it through to either completion, or a state where if it was never continued, it wouldn’t be considered unfinished.

In order to do this I’m going to source a little help from anyone who is interested.  Over the next week or so, I will be posting information on each of my unfinished projects and samples of them and inviting any criticism or encouragement for which, if any, projects have wings and which, if any, projects should be buried.

I might not take any advice or suggestions, but I thought I might invite it, partly to see if anyone beyond a few people I know actually reads this, and if anyone out there really desperately wants comments on at all.

by ·Comments Off on Film: Summer Wars

 Summer Wars follows a young mathematical genius who poses as the boyfriend to a girl he knows as a favor when she attends a family gathering for her matriarchal quasi-warlord-like grandmother’s 90th birthday in the scenic Japanese countryside.  The plot of the film concerns the threat of collapse of a digital environment called “Oz” that the world has grown to depend on at the hands of a rogue AI program that has been released by the American military that is absorbing the accounts of users and gaining all of the administrative privileges of said accounts which is in turn affecting anything that the owners of those accounts could do and generally wreaking havoc in the real world.  *takes a breath*

If those two sentences seem at odds with each other, I wish to state that is entirely purposeful:  Summer Wars is a film about conflict as implied by the title, but it’s about a conflict of different generations, of different worlds and how as things change the basic details remain the same and all adversity can be overcome through working together.  It’s a very effective and beautiful film that’s admittedly a little strange in places and it takes a while to sink in, but the short version is that I would definitely recommend it to anyone that gets a chance to see it.  A good fully dubbed / subbed slightly-more-English-language-friendly version is due to be released in March.

 And now for the long version.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Process Maps

A process map is meant to make a process more obvious by displaying it in a visual form.  I occasionally have to do this in my current role.

Things like this baffle me:

A process map apparently can't just have two boxes. That's less of a process and more of an event I suppose.

This is not from my company and I’m not saying who it’s from, other than it’s from a regulated financial services firm, all of which are potentially facing some slightly stricter complaint handling requirements fairly soon.

 It seems mostly unnecessary.  The obvious diagram for me would just be “complaint received” followed by “log complaint”, but maybe that’s just me.

I see this quite a lot at the moment.  Documents that have a purpose and are a business requirement often take so long getting to the point and so much longer talking around the point that by the time they’re finished and published, nobody in their right mind is ever going to read them, much less update them.  In fact, the only people that will read them are going to be regulators inspecting a business, by which point you have provided your own noose by producing process documentation that nobody has read, nobody updates and most likely does not reflect your current business practises.

All the same, inexperienced staff like myself look at these things for inspiration on how they should be doing things and feel their productions are inferior if they don’t have a similar word count, so the cycle repeats. 

 

by ·Comments Off on Distractions

This past week I have rediscovered, if indeed I ever truly forgot, just how easily I am distracted by the smallest of things.

Some careless comment last week has led to me reliving some childhood memories of Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s all much much shorter than I remember and much simpler too, although this could be a decade old muscle memory kicking in as I pick up the old clunky Megadrive controller.

I’ve also discovered a small game that I’ve read about a couple of times called “Game Dev Story”, a simple sim game where you run your own game studio by hiring, firing and developing new games to earn money. It’s so remarkably insultingly easy, being essentially a spreadsheet with pictures, yet it is also so unbelievably compelling that I have been compulsively “developing games” all day and now have my own console, the “Uberdrive” and a good four sequel ridden franchises.

It’s actually been an interesting exercise in understanding sequels and why they are so prevalent: They sell and aren’t in any way shape or form a risk. It is however rather sad that even in a simple simulation game, I fall into the trap that many real life studios fall into anyway of just reiterating their same titles again and again. Regardless, if you have some kind of iDevice, I would take a look, just to see what ti’s about.

These distractions that have been attacking and successfully derailing me can only mean one thing: I have a couple of projects that I want to do, which of course shoots my susceptibility to such distractions sky high. I shall post more about these when I have done a bit more, but to cut a boring story short, I’m making a new game and am inordinately proud of where it is so far.